Prizes

2006 Vilcek Prize Recipients

Prize Recipients

2006

The Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science

Joan Massagué, Ph.D.

Dr. Joan Massagué is Chairman of the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Professor at the Cornell University Graduate School of Medical Sciences, and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, in New York. He is internationally recognized for his work on the control of cell growth and fate by the TGF-(beta) family of growth factors.

Dr. Massagué and his colleagues elucidated fundamental machinery that conveys growth inhibitory signals from the cell membrane to the nucleus. Combining biochemistry and genetics, Dr. Massagué identified the TGF-(beta) receptors and their mechanism of activation. Building on this, he found that a family of TGF-(beta) receptor kinase substrates, Smad proteins, are transcriptional activators, thereby establishing the central concept of how this pathway operates. The end result of this process, Massagué found, is the inhibition of cyclin-dependent protein kinases through novel inhibitors that he co-discovered. This contiguous set of protein-to-protein and protein-to-DNA interactions provided a direct explanation of how TGF-(beta) negatively controls the cell cycle. TGF-(beta) signaling mechanisms are now known to be crucial in embryonic development, and their disruption contributes to tumor formation and metastasis. The latter are current topics of investigation by Dr. Massagué and his group. Dr. Massagué has published over two-hundred research articles on these subjects.

Born in 1953, Dr. Massagué received a Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry in 1978 from the University of Barcelona. He was a Research Fellow at Brown University until 1982 when he joined the Faculty of Biochemistry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He assumed his current positions in 1989. He served in the advisory boards of the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, the MD Anderson Cancer Center, the Fox Chase Cancer Center, the Searle Foundation and the General Motors Prize Foundation, and in the editorial boards of The Journal of Biological Chemistry, The Journal of Cell Biology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Massagué is an elected Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Associate of the European Molecular Biology Organization.

The Vilcek Prize in The Arts

Christo and Jeanne-Claude

1935 Christo: American, Bulgarian born Christo Javacheff, June 13, Gabrovo, of an industrialist family; Jeanne-Claude: American, French born Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, June 13, Casablanca, of a French military family, educated in France and Switzerland.

1952 Jeanne-Claude. Baccalaureat in Latin and Philosophy, University of Tunis.

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The Vilcek Prize

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